" ... The man who led the facsimile project, a proudly dishevelled Englishman named Adam Lowe, was admiring the fake walls alongside me. Lowe prefers to call them “rematerialized” walls. He whispered, “Amazing—it looks just like the real thing, doesn’t it?” He is fifty-seven years old, and looks like what Paul McCartney might look like had McCartney never undergone restoration. Lowe, a former painter, who, in the nineteen-eighties, became obsessed with printmaking, runs Factum Arte, a “digital mediation” workshop that is based in Madrid. It took two years for Lowe and several dozen technicians to remake the Tutankhamun walls—considerably longer than the ancient Egyptians took to produce them. Perfecting the digital printout, he told me, had involved hundreds of hours of analog assessment: thousands of paint samples were mixed by hand, in Luxor, to match the tones in the original tomb, then compared with ink-jet outputs. ...

"Imagine the sounds coming out of a busy blacksmith shop in an alleyway in Paris sometime back in the 18th century: the hammering of wrought iron, the rhythmic whoosh of air as the blacksmith uses a bellows to stoke a fire.

We have no recordings of the actual sounds of Paris in those early days, so to try and make those 18th-century streets and alleys of Paris come to life takes a bit of careful historical research and a little imagination.

That's where French musicologist Mylène Pardoen, who's been described as an "archaeologist of sound," comes in. She's created an "interpretation" of what Paris might have sounded like way back then. ...

"Even before the publication of the first collection of Clavier-Sonaten für Kenner und Liebhaber in 1779, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach began composing works intended for a follow-up. This time he expanded the original concept, however, and included not just three sonatas, but also three rondos 'for the fortepiano'. In his treatment of the rondo-form, Bach was – as always – a mould-breaker and in the ‘Kenner und Liebhaber’ rondos the refrain melody inevitably creeps into the episodes, which in turn wander through distant tonalities. The phrase structure is frequently asymmetrical, and the borders between sections are often blurred, making this rather schematic form into something of a roller-coaster ride. Taking note of Bach's instructions regarding the choice of instrument, Miklós Spányi performs them on a tangent piano, an early form of the piano. ...

Just a reminder of the Tafelmusik Winter Institute (TWI) in January 2017. (ed.)

" ... our fifth annual Tafelmusik Winter Institute, to be held in Toronto January 5–11, 2017. We will once again welcome a select group of period players to join us for an intensive week of specialized orchestral study.

This year we will focus on the string orchestra in baroque Italy, exploring music written in Rome, Bologna, Naples, and Venice 1650-1750, by composers such as Caldara, Corelli, Cazzati, Locatelli, Torelli, Scarlatti, Durante, Leo, and Vivaldi. ...

"The complete line-up of Festival Concerts has just been announced for the June 2017 Boston Early Music Festival. You won't want to a miss a full week bursting with opera and concerts performed by some of the most engaging artists and ensembles on the world stage today! ...

"In previous posts, we have offered background and details on versions by William Byrd and Tomás Luis de Victoria. This week’s post is devoted to the beautiful setting of “O magnum mysterium” by Spanish composer, Cristóbal de Morales (c. 1500 – 1553), offering background and essential insights that lead to an historically-sensitive performance. ...

"J.G. Goldberg might just be the most famous composer whose music remains largely unheard. A child prodigy, his name has become almost a household term, thanks to Bach’s masterpiece, popularly known as the “Goldberg” Variations. Goldberg did not live to see age 30, and his body of surviving works is ...

"This workshop will focus on the two composers working for Maximilian I, Heinrich Isaac and Ludvig Senfl. Born in the Netherlands around 1450, Isaac spent many years in Florence at the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent until the rise of Savonarola caused him, in 1497, to move to Vienna where he became court composer to Maximilian. Swiss born Senfl joined the Hofkapelle as boy chorister and studied under Isaac, taking over his role upon Isaac’s death. ...

"Following the major earthquake which hit Lorca in May 2011, substantial repairs were required to many of the historic buildings in the city of Lorca, amongst them the Palacio de Guevara. During the repair works a flute was discovered, which has now been examined and found to be an eighteenth century instrument, a very rare find in Spain. ...

"We invite you to join us for an incredible two-week festival, The St. Petersburg - Prague Double Vintage Dance Week in 2017. Densely filled with adventures, the St. Petersburg and Prague weeks will be the historical dance event of the decade! Richard Powers, Hannelore Unfried and Boris Stratilatov will be our teachers in St. Petersburg. In addition to dance classes, the program includes dancing evenings, a midnight jazz dance cruise, summertime walking through St. Petersburg, a traditional Russian dance picnic, the 19th Century Grand Ball in a magnificent palace, and the fabled White Nights of St. Petersburg, when it's still twilight at midnight. ...

"Shakespeare re-imagined for the very Late Baroque, with Bampton Classical Opera at St John's Smith Square. "Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare....the God of Our Idolatory". So wrote David Garrick in his Ode to Shakespeare (1759) through which the actor and showman marketed Shakespeare to new audiences, fanning the flames of "Bardolatory". All Europe was soon caught up in the frenzy. ...

This event is open to all ‒ both experienced dancers and those with only an emergent interest in Elizabethan dances. The programme will be led by Anne Daye and Ann Hinchliffe from the Historical Dance Society. ...

"To work in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle in England is one of the most delicious prizes for a researcher. Climbing the steps to the Round Tower, where you can read centuries-old correspondence between monarchs and their ministers, untie ribbons binding intimate family records and feel the parchment crackling in your fingers, is viscerally thrilling. ...

"Colonization rears its ugly head whenever there is “globalization.” In the 1500s, several European nations were aggressively globalizing, especially Spain, and especially in the Americas. At the time of Christopher Columbus’s westward wanderings, the Americas already had strong indigenous cultures. There was a great fondness for music and dancing, especially for rituals and celebrations.

We often wonder how to involve our younger "up and coming" and inspired musicians in our performance programs. Here, as example of a successful option to youth involvement, is a snapshot of the "Monteverdi Apprentices Programme" established in 2007.

"The aim of the Apprentices Programme is to recruit the most promising young performers – those on the verge of entering the profession – and introduce them to the musical tradition of the Monteverdi Choir and the working practices of Sir John Eliot Gardiner by way of a year-long apprenticeship, involving participation in the Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique projects, as well as additional mentoring and coaching sessions with the Monteverdi musical staff. ...

"Our Christmas programme this year features works by Jacob Clemens and his Franco-Flemish contemporaries. Clemens’s music is polyphonic perfection: unlike most northern European composers of the time he never travelled to Italy; he revels in relatively conservative close-worked counterpoint and sonorous chording. ...

As you may or may not know, Sagittarius is in its final throes of its illustrious 30th season which ends this December 2016. If you would like to take part in hearing them live and in performance, you will want to visit their site and purchase tickets to their 2 remaining concert events before they are all sold-out. It will be with sadness and with fond farewells that we see the members of the organization close its doors. ...

"In his November 9th piece for Deadline Hollywood, Jeremy Gerard reports that the bottom is falling out for serious arts criticism at The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Reviewerswill be fighting for their existence in the online equivalent of journalistic death cage matches: picked off in hybrid lifestyle sections, such as the Journal‘s new “Life and Arts.” And that fade-out encourages publications lower on the food chain to ditch arts criticism, if they haven’t already. Or it serves as an excuse to let reviews gently dangle over the edge of the cliff, as The Boston Globe is doing with its move to have non-profit organizations pay for arts criticism. ...

"We’re delighted to announce that one of our very exciting Future Baroque artists, soprano Rowan Pierce, will perform for us at our Festival Launch on Monday 23 January. She will be joined by members of the Medici Ensemble, with whom she made such a great impression on the audience at their lunchtime concert at the 2015 Festival. The Launch event will take place at the East India Club, 16 St James's Square, St. James's, London SW1Y 4LH. We're immensely grateful to Philip and Christine Miles for hosting this event. ...

A benefit performance of Downland, Byrd, and Holborne in support of Salon/Sanctuary Concerts

"Works of Holborne, Byrd, and the great John Dowland, a Catholic exile from the Protestant court of Elizabeth I, form this program to be performed by "Living Legend" Hopkinson Smith, as a benefit event for Salon/Sanctuary Concerts. ...

"When the members of Bay Area baroque ensemble Musica Pacifica put together their program for the opening of the 40th season of the S.F. Early Music Society, little could they have suspected that sacred and secular music from 17th century Italy would offer much needed distraction, comfort and soothing in the wake of an emotionally turbulent week. ...

"The appearing of wound strings caused, starting from the end of the 17th century, the definitive abandoning of the ancient manufacturing techniques of the traditional all-gut bass strings.

This explains why modern plain gut strings fail to produce an acceptable acoustical performance in the low registers, thus making it unavoidable to use wound strings for musical repertoires that actually pre-date their historical appearing; this, in turn, causes an obvious philological paradox as well as serious tone and balance problems between high and low registers, especially on Lutes. ...

For those of you in the Washington D.C area, you may want to take a closer look at this group's concert line-ups.

About Aberfoyle Baroque: "Jessica Honigberg and Carolyn Winter launched Aberfoyle Baroque aiming to promote the harpsichord through performance and education in the greater Washington DC metropolitan area. They believe this magnificent and versatile instrument should be enjoyed by a wider audience than is currently the case. ...

"Following on the 2015 release of Mozart’s Requiem, Masaaki Suzuki and his Bach Collegium Japan has gone on to record the composers Mass in C minor, K427 – the ‘Great Mass’. As the nickname indicates it is a work of unusual proportions for a mass of the Classical period. ....

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